There’s been a lot of talk about how we are going to curb the spread of this disease once the lock-down measures are lifted. We aren’t going to be able to return to life as we knew it unless we figure out a way to solve this problem on a large scale. A vaccine is one solution. But that seems a long way off. I don’t think the population at large is willing to (or actually can) wait that long.
Health and government officials keep talking about the ability to trace who has come in contact with the virus. If we can do this effectively it can be a key tool for us. This will allow medical personnel to make sure that people that might be infected are locked away for a few weeks and kept away from all the healthy virus-free people.
Smartphones make technological tracing possible. Turn on your Bluetooth and allow it to interact with other gadgets while you go about your day. If someone tests positive for the coronavirus they mark it down in the app and we all get a lovely notification telling us we might be screwed.
It seems easy enough. Officials in a variety of countries have already touted this method as a gamechanger. And I have no doubt it can be. Applications are already out there and people are using them.
I’ve heard a lot about an app like this called TraceTogether the last few days while here in Australia. A certain percentage of the population needs to be using it for it to be effective (the number I’ve been hearing is 40%). And if not enough people opt-in voluntarily then the government has toyed with the idea of making it compulsory.
The government is going to try to give everyone a chance to “make the right decision”. They’ll attempt to sway people by appeasing to their conscience. We can save lives if we do it this way. And I think that is important. No doubt. It’s going to be a difficult decision to make for a lot of people.
If that fails I’m sure the government will dangle it in front of people like a technological carrot. Step this way and you can have your life back. I think there’s a good portion of the population that would jump on that. On the whole, we value our social lives and daily pleasures more than we value our personal freedoms.
But I think whichever way you look at it it’s going to be a bad trade for us. Of course, government officials are going to say that our personal data is going to be protected. Facebook and Experian said the same thing. The fact of the matter is that nothing is perfectly safe in the cyber world.
And losing personal information is not the scariest thing to me. What scares me the most is losing my right to privacy. Privacy is a personal freedom. And the thought that a government can mandate I use software that can diminish my right to privacy makes me uncomfortable. At least with Facebook, I have some choice in the matter.
Let’s face it, it’s easy to make bad decisions when we are afraid or frustrated. We’ve all been locked inside for almost a month now and we desperately want our old lives back. But what price are we willing to pay to get back to normal? Once we give this type of freedom away there is almost no way of getting it back. And I think that’s worth thinking about.